Biohazard Cleanup Near Orson Andrews, TX

Andrews is a city in the Permian Basin of West Texas, on U.S. Highway 385 about thirty-four miles north of Odessa and thirty miles east of the New Mexico line.

Andrews is the county seat of Andrews County and the only incorporated municipality in the entire county.

Both the city and the county are named for Richard Andrews, the first Texan soldier to die in the Texas Revolution — wounded at Gonzales on October 2, 1835, he died twenty-six days later at the Battle of Concepción.

The town began around 1908 with just a general store and a schoolhouse, at a time when only eighty-seven people — mostly ranchers — lived in the whole county.

Andrews won the county seat in 1910 after a spirited contest against Shafter Lake, which is now a ghost town, and residents built their first courthouse in 1911; the current Moderne-style courthouse dates to 1939.

Local rancher R. M. Means famously helped Andrews win the county-seat vote by giving town lots to cowhands so they would qualify as property-owning voters.

Andrews was transformed by oil — the Deep Rock Oil Company made the county's first major strike in 1929, and new Means wells in 1934 sped development; Andrews County has since produced more than a billion barrels, passing its two billionth barrel in 1980 and its three billionth in 2012.

Andrews was incorporated on February 2, 1937.

Oil money built an unusually rich school system in Andrews — in the 1950s boom the town was once the fastest-growing in Texas, and its neighborhood schools for first-graders carried fairy-tale names like Bo Peep, Peter Pan, Jack Horner, and Cinderella.

Andrews' population has ridden the oil cycle — 611 in 1940, 11,135 in 1960, down to 9,652 in 2000, and back up to 13,487 at the 2020 census.